The apple is an edible fruit with seeds of a sweet and acidulous taste and with the property more or less astringent according to the varieties. From a botanical point of view, it is a complex fruit because it derives from the entire flower and its receptacle1, unlike simple fruits that derive solely from the ovary. It is produced by apple trees, trees of the genus Malus. In France, it is the most consumed of the cultivated fruits2 and the third in the world.
The main types of apples are all domestic apple or common apple, of the species Malus domestica, which has about 20,000 varieties and cultivars around the world. It has a squat, characteristic3 shape, sometimes almost spherical, and is eaten raw, cooked or dried. Its juice is drunk as is or pasteurized; fermented, it takes the name of "cider".
Associated with the fruit defended in the representations of the Book of Genesis, it often symbolizes in the West the original sin or the sexual act.
Etymology
The earliest attestation of the word in French dates back to the year 1100 in the Song of Roland in the form of pume4.
The word apple comes from the POMA gallo-roman, a term of Latin origin with the ending -a (collective neutral plural), taken for a singular feminine5. In Latin, pomum (neu- tral singular) is the "fruit of a tree, a fruit with pips or kernels" whose radical is found in Pomona, the goddess of fruits. In classical Latin, the apple is called malum (which gave mail in Romansh, mela in Italian and măr in Romanian). The word apple has replaced malum because the apple remains the fruit, the pomum, par excellence. On the other hand, the general meaning of "fruit" has continued for a long time, as evidenced by the names of potatoes, scallops, orange apples or even pine cones or cinnamon apples.
In some French-speaking African countries, the word apple refers to the potato, while the apple is referred to as apple-fruit or apple de France. German has borrowed French from French fries, usually reduced to apples, with [s] sound.
The ancient Celtic was * ablu "apple" and its derivative * abalnos / * abalna "apple tree". He gave the Gallic abalo- "apple" and aballo "apple tree" (avallo in the glossary of Vienna, glossed poma in Latin), the old Irish ubull "apple" and aball "apple tree", Welsh afal, cornic down and the Breton downstream "apple", (e) ur wezenn-downstream "apple tree", literally "an apple tree". We find the same Indo-European root in Germanic, cf. Dutch call, German Apfel, English apple.
Lastly, toponymy retains many traces of old-style apples: Avallon (Yonne, Aballo IVth century), Availles-Limouzine (Vienna, Avallia 1123), etc. go back to the Gallic aballo- "apple tree". The Gallo-Romanesque and the old French gave the type * POMARETU, formed on POMAR- + collective suffix Gallo-Roman-ETU used to designate "a set of trees belonging to the same species", from where the Pommeray ( oïl) / Pomarède (oc), etc.
DescriptionEquatorial section of an apple, showing, from the outside towards the center, the skin of the fruit (in red), the flesh (green-white) and five seeds (brown, in the center) more or less sectioned or notched.
The apple is a fruit, (in fact a false fruit) trees of the genus Malus (Malus domestica) and more precisely a composite fruit because constituted at one and the same time by the ovary, the base of the floral pieces and the receptacle, the whole being welded, fleshy, almost spherical, depressed at the top and base, homogeneous pulp (in contrast to pears that contain sclerified or stony cells). Some older varieties have special shapes, such as the apple api, rather flat and star-shaped pentagonal, or the pigeons, on the contrary very elongated. The English lemon pipin, old cooking apple, has the shape and color of a lemon.
Its weight is very variable according to the varieties and the conditions of vegetation. Its mature colors range from green "apple" to more or less dark red through a wide variety of intermediates: pale green, yellow, orange or more or less variegated colors.
At the top of the fruit (opposite to that of the insertion of the peduncle), one can see the remains of desiccated sepals. Indeed, the apple comes from a flower called "ovary inferior and adherent", that is to say that the perianth, including sepals and petals, is at the top of the ovary and the latter is welded to the floral receptacle.
From a botanical point of view, the apple is a complex fruit, intermediate between the bay and the drupe. Some botanists call "piridion" this type of fruit, typical of the family Rosaceae, subfamily Maloideae.
In a cross section, we can see, in the center, the seeds (the seeds) two in each of the five boxes of the initial ovary surrounded by a sclerified envelope (which reminds the core of a drupe), the whole being itself surrounded by a thin pulp, which corresponds to the development of the wall of the ovary. Then a thin fibrous membrane marks the separation with the receptacle which has considerably thickened to form the bulk of the flesh of the fruit. So that what we eat is in fact the nature of an induvia: it is the envelope of the fruit, the latter constituting the core.
From a genetic point of view, the apple has seventeen chromosomes and the genome of the domestic apple tree was fully deciphered by an Italian team in August 2010: the researchers show the existence of 992 disease resistance genes and a "duplication complete genome that caused the transition from nine ancestral chromosomes to seventeen chromosomes of the Pyreae, ancestor of the apple6,6. This phenomenon of polyploidy (which has also occurred in the pear and poplar) occurred 50 to 65 million years ago and could come from a survival reaction ("effect of vigor") against a a disaster that resulted in massive destruction of species, including dinosaurs
